[329] Almack's Club, in Pall Mall, surpassed White's in the extravagance of its gambling. Brooks, a money-lender and wine-merchant, took up the management of the club, which was dispersed when he opened the new premises of Brooks' Club, in St. James's Street, in 1778.
[330] Mr. Child (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, part iii. p. 199, Boston, 1885) says that Mallet passed off as his own, with very slight changes, a ballad called William and Margaret, a copy of which, dated 1711, has been discovered. But the resemblances between the two poems scarcely seem to justify Mr. Child's criticism, though Gibbon's statement confirms it. The writer of the article on Mallet, in the Dictionary of National Biography, throws no doubts upon Mallet being the author of William and Margaret, nor does the writer on Marvell, in the same series, lay any claim for Marvell to its authorship. Thomas, better known as "Hesiod," Cooke, who published his Life and Writings of Andrew Marvell in 1726, and who not only disliked Mallet, but characterised his William and Margaret as "trash," nowhere suggests that Mallet was not the author. The first stanza is taken from Beaumont and Fletcher's comedy of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, where old Merrythought sings—
"When it was grown to dark midnight,
And all were fast asleep,
In came Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet."
In Percy's Reliques, vol. iii. p. 331 (ed. Dodsley, 1759), Mallet's poem is printed with the following note: "This Ballad, which appeared in some of the public Newspapers in or before the year 1724, came from the pen of David Mallet, Esq.; who in the edition of his poems, 3 vols., 1759, informs us that the plan was suggested by the four verses quoted above ***, which he supposed to be the beginning of some ballad now lost."
[331] The report of General Lee's capture was false. He was taken prisoner December 13, 1776.
[332] Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, afterwards Bishop of London, had been chaplain to Archbishop Secker, whose Charges he published in 1769. He did not publish any reply to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
[333] Sir Guy Carleton was gazetted K.B., July 6, 1776.